10/15/2008

What I’m about to say will, if it works out to be true, cause Lawrence O’Donnell to have a coronary on Nov. 5. In the immediate aftermath of Kerry’s loss to Bush in 2004, O’Donnell called for blue states to secede from the Union. So, we will need a volunteer in the blogosphere to stay with O’Donnell on election night with a portable defibrillator in order to zap him back to life.

ASSUMING that the pre-election polling is close to accurate, if Obama is leading in the national polls coming out of the final weekend by 52% or less, he’s going to lose. If he’s at 53% it’ll probably be very close, but he may still lose. If its 54% or above, he will win. And it’s not the “Bradley Effect.”

Why does he have to be that high? It’s the revenge of the small states on steroids in the electoral college. The math is actually pretty simple, although some assumptions have to be made about turnout and victory margin in specific states (i.e., that current polls in those states are close to being accurate).

Let’s start with turnout: In 2000, there were 101.5 million votes cast for the two major party candidates. In 2005, there were 121 million votes cast for the two major party candidates.

I think it would be unlikely to have another 20% increase in voter turnout, but let’s assume that there will be for now given all the crowing the Democrats have done about their voter registration efforts. That would put the gross vote total around 145 million votes.

At 52-48%, the breakdown in votes would be 75.4 million to 69.6 million — a total vote differential of 5.8 million more votes for Obama than for McCain.

But Obama is certain to carry 6 out of the 9 largest electoral vote states won by Kerry, and in most instances by wider margins than Kerry won over Bush. Those winning margins are going to eat up most if not all of the 5.8 million vote differential, meaning McCain will win several smaller states by smaller margins than Bush did but still win the majority of electoral votes. Here is the math:

2004: Kerry beats Bush in the following states by the listed amounts:

CA: 55-45 (differential of 1.25 million votes)

NY: 59-41 (differential of 1.35 million votes)

IL: 55-45 (differential of 540,000 votes)

MI: 52-48 (differential of 170,000 votes)

NJ: 53-47 (differential of 240,000 votes)

MA: 63-37 (differential of 730,000 votes)

Total vote differential in those 6 states — 4.28 million more votes for Kerry than Bush.

In the other 44 states and DC, Bush beat Kerry by a total of 7+ million votes because he won the overall total by 3 million.

2008: We can safely put those same 6 states, with a combined total of 151 electoral votes, in Obama’s column. But if Obama wins the total nationwide vote by 5.8 million votes (52-48), how much of that 5.8 million will come out of those 6 states?

If you assume a 20% increase in turnout in each and you use the current polling for each of those states (splitting the undecideds), you get the following vote differentials in each:

CA: 14.7 million votes — 58-42% (differential of 2.36 million votes)

NY: 8.7 million votes — 66-34% (differential of 2.79 million votes)

IL: 6.3 million votes — 57-43% (differential of 880,000 votes)

MI: 5.75 million votes — 58-42% (differential of 910,000 votes)

NJ: 4.4 million votes — 56-44% (differential of 540,000 votes)

MA: 3.4 million votes — 58-42% (differential of 550,000 votes)

Total Differential from these 6 states: 8.03 million votes.

Here are the percentages of what Kerry actually won vs. what Obama is currently polling in these 6 states:

CA — 55 v. 58

NY — 59 v. 66

IL — 55 v. 57

MI — 52 v. 58

NJ — 53 v. 56

MA — 63 v. 58

Nothing terribly dramatic here. Given the state of the war and the economy, you would expect Obama to do better in very liberal states like California and New York given BDS. And you would expect the reversal of Illinois and Massachusetts since they are the home states of the nominees.

If Obama wins only 52-48 nationwide — a total of 5.8 million votes — then he loses the other 44 states and DC by a total of 2.2 million votes (8.0 – 5.8 = 2.2). McCain is going to have several small state victories by modest margins and several medium states wins by small margins, but he is going to pile up electoral votes from those states.

If Obama wins 53-47 nationwide, his margin overall would increase to 8.6 million votes. Yet about 8 million votes of that margin will come in 6 states listed above with 151 electoral votes. He would need to use his other 500,000 vote margin to win another 119 electoral votes – a very small window. He needs that margin to work out to narrow victories in PA, MN, CO, NV, and NH.

If Obama wins 54-46, he has a vote differential of 11.6 million votes and he wins the electoral college easily since he has nearly 6 million votes to find his other 119 electoral votes. That means he will win also win by close margins in places like OH, VA, WI, and FL.

The easiest way to understand this is that if Obama wins by only 4-6 points (52-53%) nationwide but he wins 4-6 large states by margins of 8-20%, then McCain is going to win a lot of states by less than 4%, and he’s going to win the electoral college as a result. Put another way, McCain is going to win 53 electoral votes from MT, ID, WY, UT, ND, SD, NE(4-5), KS, OK, AK, AR, MS, and his total margin of victory will probably be about 1/2 of Obama’s margin of victory in either CA or NY. Obama will have a lot more votes, but they won’t mean anything in the electoral college.

50 Responses to “Revenge of the Small States, Part II … I’m Just Saying …”

I’ve always been convinced by the argument that Hamilton was surprised when he had the opportunity to write (as Publius) that even the Anti-Federalists (who had a criticism about every other part of the Constitution) thought that the use of the Electoral College to elect the President was a fairly good system. If I remember correctly, he wrote that everyone admitted that it was pretty well protected.

THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.1 I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm, that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent. It unites in an eminent degree all the advantages, the union of which was to be wished for.

I remember Cathy Seipp coining the term “Larry O’Scary” after his seething attack on her during Dennis Miller’s show on CNBC. He came across as an unhinged misogynist, and my opinion of him since those days has only progessed downward.

Thing is, McCain’s going to win the southern states by a very high percentage.

In the states where McCain leads now, he’s got a double-digit lead in almost all of them.

This is a very polarized election from that perspective — the deep south is really mad at Obama, and going for McCain in double digits.

So a lot of McCain’s national support is concentrated there, in traditionally Republican states like Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama (McCain is polling at 24 percent ahead of Obama there — cue Skinnard riff).

That’s why Obama’s national lead isn’t completely indicative of his electoral college lead.

I have a question about the national polls, because I raised the same question at my blog last month: do any of the national polls try to weight these polls based on state by state representation to try and normalize by electoral college?

Oh, and there isn’t any way that Obama wins 50+% of the popular vote. If he wins, it will be via plurality, just like Clinton.

Certainly McCain will win the Southern states by a very high percentage, Phil…but they’ve also got far lower populations than the big states (with the exception of Texas). I’m not quite sure that WLS’s math pans out entirely, here…but not for that reason, Phil.

Lawrence O’Donnell’s biggest meltdown came during the primaries when, in response to a question about Romney (in light of the then “new” Reverend Wright controversy), he went ballistic against the Mormon church during a taping of The McLaughlin Group. I may be wrong but I don’t think he’s been back on that show since then.

And why do these libs always have to talk about leaving? “If Bush wins I’m moving to France,” or ‘the blue states should secede’. It’s like they feel the need to shout, “I’m not really a patriot!”

I agree that some have a lower population of voters. That doesn’t change the fact that when McCain wins there by 15-20 percent of the voters, Obama suddely has a lot more voters to draw from in other states under WLS’s math.

And Texas is the second most populous state in the country, with 23 million people. Lots of voters there for McCain — and he’s going to carry that state by likely 10-14 percent. Gotta be at least a million or more surplus votes in that state alone.

Also, if Obama gets 52 percent of the vote, McCain is only getting like 46.5 percent (not 48), because 2 percent of voters wiil get split between Nader and Barr and write-ins (including Ron Paul).

— Uh, Obama is going to win Delaware and Vermont. McCain is going to win Texas, and most likely will carry Florida by a slim margin. States like New Hampshire, where McCain has a very good chance of winning, or Minnesota, where Obama should win but the polls are MUCH closer than anyone expected . . .

why do these libs always have to talk about leaving? “If Bush wins I’m moving to France,” or ‘the blue states should secede’. It’s like they feel the need to shout, “I’m not really a patriot!”

I actually think they have such massive egos that they believe the threat of losing them will cause some people to change their votes. It’s not about saying they don’t like America — it’s about saying “do what I want, or I’m leaving,” and thinking people will care.

I actually think they have such massive egos that they believe the threat of losing them will cause some people to change their votes. It’s not about saying they don’t like America — it’s about saying “do what I want, or I’m leaving,” and thinking people will care.

If a libtard Bush-hater like Alec Baldwin is angrily aware of the duplicity of Barney Fag in the housing crisis, why aren’t more people seeing what is right in front of their lying eyes? Alec was one of those who was supposed to exit the country after Dubya won.

So you’ve got various assclown celebs and pundits making threats or chastising people that blacks will riot if Obambi loses. Skanky ‘ho Madonna is going to kick Palin’s ass. Has-been Wonder woman Carter says Palin is a dictator and Oliver Stone thinks W is a genius compared to Palin. I know, I know, we don’t give a rat’s ass what the glitterati thinks, but I assume all that is red meat for the Obamatards. Isn’t it good for red state Americans to see the vitriol emanating from the fever swamp left mutants? Are people in general really that fecked up that they will be milquetoasts and allow the latter/arugula libs to take us down the road to voting that is no longer secret ballot? We already know Obama supports card checking. Even the monkey boy Hugo Chavez was called on his BS last election, but I’m sure he hasn’t given up.

While McCain will win Texas, because of Obama’s support among Latinos, he’s going to win Texas by a smaller margin than Bush won Texas. So, in that respect, it further plays into my scenario.

McCain is also going to win in places like Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, by smaller margins than Bush won them. That further cuts into Obama’s window of opportunity IF — and that’s the big IF — Obama only wins 52% of the vote nationwide.

It’s not about saying they don’t like America — it’s about saying “do what I want, or I’m leaving,” and thinking people will care.

— That’s all well and good, except that they frame their ‘threats’ in the language of “I can’t live in a country with him as president”; intentional or not, they are saying “I don’t love my country enough to stick around and work/fight to make it better”. You’re right, though: making such statements is the ‘grownup’ version of threatening to hold ones breath until they turn blue and pass out, unless you do things their way.

Also, if Obama gets 52 percent of the vote, McCain is only getting like 46.5 percent (not 48), because 2 percent of voters wiil get split between Nader and Barr and write-ins (including Ron Paul).

Comment by Phil — 10/15/2008 @ 2:16 pm

No, Phil.
If you read the post, you would see that the numbers are predicated on the split between the two (2) major candidates. All of the percentages shown are the split between those two, disregarding any votes cast for minor parties.
Kapeesh?

One argument I have with your theory, WLS is that the population increase in California is all illegal. There is something like a net 600,000 legal residents leaving each year. Of course, ACORN will register the illegals so maybe you are correct after all.

All of the percentages shown are the split between those two, disregarding any votes cast for minor parties.

Then WLS needs to drop the part about where Obama is polling. The fact that Obama is polling at 52 percent doesn’t mean he’ll have a 52/48 lead over McCain. Because every single poll takes includes undecides and third party candidates.

In polls where Obama is actually polling at 52 percent, McCain is down in the low 40s. Meaning Obama’s percentage lead over McCain (as opposed to over the field as a whole) is around 8 percentage points, not four.

I have been thinking about this recently, and here are the two absolute worst scenarios for the election:

1) Obama wins (no matter what, this is the worst possible outcome).

2) McCain wins, but loses the popular vote.

If the latter happens, I fear that the left wing will go ballistic. We’ll have four more years of hearing how the GOP games the system, how it is stacked against minority candidates, how white slaveowners anticipated the day when a Halfrican-American from Chicago by way of Cambridge, New York, California, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kansas would come to deliver us from our evil capitalistic corporate system and lead us to the promised land, and those white slaveowner Revolutionaries designed a system to bury him in electoral college gibberish which allows Dixie to elect the President. Maybe we’ll finally have the Revolution that they have been promising since Eugene Debs was in full flower. In any case, it’s bound to be ugly.

I actually think they have such massive egos that they believe the threat of losing them will cause some people to change their votes. It’s not about saying they don’t like America — it’s about saying “do what I want, or I’m leaving,” and thinking people will care.

If that’s the case I may be willing to reconsider my opposition to the expatriate tax.

Whoa, this post makes my head spin. But I love the logic, and that somebody out there is smart enough to run the numbers for me. And who is not in the tank for the dems. I just discovered your blog yesterday, and added you to my blogroll. Keep up the good work.

To Phil — This post is not intended to be a be-all-and-end-all analysis of how the election WILL turn out. It simply lays out a scenario that is not completely implausible, which would produce quite a head-scratching result.

What I’ve laid out here is nothing new to people who have complained for many election cycles that the electoral college is outdated and results in an extreme over-representation of small states in the selection of the President. Its as simple as this:

In 2005, each of Wyoming’s 3 electoral votes represents about 80,000 actual voters at the polls.

Each of California’s 55 electoral votes represented about 223,000 actual voters at the polls.

Each vote in Wyoming had about 3x the value in the electoral college as each vote in California.

This same math plays out in all the small population states that get the same number of electoral votes for their Senators as the large states get.

If you go state by state Obama pretty much has a lock on the needed electoral votes as of today at least, and the trend has been in his favor for the last month. The maps based on state polling on Fivethirtyeight and Real Clear Politics show the current situation.

Look especially closely at the more conservative (both in political leaning and assigning states to either candidate) Real Clear Politics map. Obama has more than the 270 needed even ignoring the 7 grey swing states that could go either way. Obama would have to lose at least two of the light blue “leaning” states (VA, MN, NM, CO) to fall under 270 (and if NM is one of them, would need to lose three).

McCain needs some sort of political earthquake at this point, and three weeks is an awfully short time as by now even the hold out undecideds are making up their minds, and people are already voting.

“I have a question about the national polls, because I raised the same question at my blog last month: do any of the national polls try to weight these polls based on state by state representation to try and normalize by electoral college?”

Here’s one Republican blogger website that uses his own formulas and analysis to convert polls into electoral votes. He’s been accurate in the past and is endorsed by Hugh Hewitt, “The Blogging Caesar at Election Projection is one of the web’s best prognosticators.”

His latest projection of the electoral vote is very bad for McCain, as are the other Republican projection websites he links to. Anything can happen, however.

State polls are a lagging indicator. They tend to move after the national polls begin to move.

In the immediate aftermath of the bailout bill, McCain was dropping steadily in the polls. But that has stopped and he has recovered into the mid-40s in most of the tracking polls.

Obama had risen above 50% in most of those same tracking polls, but he’s now slipped a point or two in most — either at 50% or just under it.

McCain now has an issue that he didn’t have last week — as one commentator said tonight, Joe The Plumber turns the tax issue from a conversation about rich into a conversation about the middle class. McCain now has a real live breathing person who is clearly “everyman” taxpayer, and Obama admitted he’s going to raise his taxes in order to give some of the money Joe earned to other people who didn’t earn it.

And Obama’s tax “plan” is coming into a little better focus. Its nothing resembling tax “cuts” — its simply US Treasury checks being mailed to people whether they paid taxes or not.

Nearly 40% of Americans who file a tax return have an effective marginal rate of 0% because of the income level and their qualification for various tax credits and deductions.

Obama’s “plan” is to simply pile more refundable tax “credits” on these filers, which results in them getting a check from the government even though they paid no taxes.

That’s welfare — plain and simple. There is no “refund” or tax “cut” because the recipient of the check paid no taxes.

These are issues McCain can ride to 2-3 points in the polls — and again, its a zero-sum game.

All projections of the electoral vote based on the polls as they stand today SHOULD show an Obama landslide.

The thesis of my post is that IF– ON ELECTION DAY — the polls have narrowed to a range of 52-48 from where they are now (probably in the range of 54-46), then Obama could lose in the electoral college while winning a sizeable victory in the nationwide vote.

Show me a site that says if Obama wins by 6 million votes, but he wins by 12-15% margins in Cal, NY, IL, MI,NJ and MA, he’ll still win an electoral landslide with only a nationwide advantage of 4%, then I’ll believe it.

But the sites you all are referring me to are forecasting electoral college results based on where the polling stands today — something I specifically said I was NOT doing. I’m projecting how the Electoral College might come out IF Obama wins only 52% of a nationwide vote of 145 million people, and including in that victory are huge margins in those 6 very liberal and very large states.

The real issue is not how well Obama or McCain might do state-by-state, but that we shouldn’t have battleground states and spectator states in the first place. Every vote in every state should be politically relevant in a presidential election. And, every vote should be equal. We should have a national popular vote for President in which the White House goes to the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral vote — that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

Because of state-by-state enacted rules for winner-take-all awarding of their electoral votes, recent candidates with limited funds have concentrated their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people have been merely spectators to the presidential election.

Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.

The National Popular Vote bill has passed 21 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes– 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.

Susan either was never taught how the Constitution was arrived at, or completely forgotten everything she learned.

For a reminder: We are not a Democracy (every vote counts);
We are a Federal Republic, that operates with democratic principles, where the minority has rights that cannot be overwhelmed by the votes of the majority (the principle behind the Electoral College, and why we have a Senate where membership is apportioned by area, not population).

When elections are decided by the poplular vote (nation-wide), we might as well abolish all state governments or make them direct departments of the Federal Government in DC, and have all issues decided on Capitol Hill.

Personally, I do not wish to live in such a country, and I think I can find millions of others to lend support to that feeling.

We constantly need to be reminded that the “government that governs best, governs least”.
A powerful, central government is the antithesis of Freedom!

Susan, I don’t want a popularly elected President. I think we’re too close to that now. I want thinking, intelligent, unpledged Electors rather than party members casting votes in the Electoral College.

Obama will have us believe that he isn’t proposing a powerful central government, and the liberal media is helping him spread his leftist illuminati views. Let’s just hope it’s not too late to spread the truth about him.

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